L.A. is a Top American City For Living Car-Free?

Los Angeles is America's City of Cars, the town built around four-wheeled transportation, the birthplace of custom-auto culture and couture.

But what if our traffic were so bad that it actually encouraged some of you to walk, bike and take the train? That just might be the case as L.A. has ranked as one of the top 10 "Best Cities to Live Practically Car Free." Really:

The folks over at CreditDonkey -- yes, CreditDonkey -- crunched the numbers, including the percentage of people who commute via public transit, gas prices and total commute time.

Our public transit rates (6.4 percent, according to CreditDonkey) are growing but otherwise sad compared to many other cities, and our gas prices are some of the highest in the nation ($4-plus), so it must be our nation-topping times spent in our cars (44 percent of us have more than half-hour commutes, the site says) that make going car-free a top option in L.A.

The combination of heavy traffic and high gas prices is more than enough to encourage Los Angeles residents to use public transportation, and it ranks 9th highest in percentage of people who use the transit system to commute to work. The city is served by a bus system, a light rail system, and a subway.

Yep. Still, we'll keep our car for now.

By the way, here's the full list of "Best Cities to Live Practically Car Free:"

L.A. Weekly staff writer Dennis Romero has worked on staff at several magazines and newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times, where he participated in Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the L.A. riots. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone online, the Guardian, and, as a young stringer, the New York Times.